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Federal Reserve To Use Internet For Money Transfer
An anonymous reader writes "According to the New York Post, the Federal Reserve (i.e. Alan Greenspan and Co.) is going to change the way that it transfers money between banks so that transfers now take place over the internet instead of via a private banking network. They aren't specifying the types of security measures that will be used (security through obscurity?) Am I the only one who thinks that this is a very bad idea? Might a DDOS attack on the Fed's computers bring down the entire banking system?" The banks have put some thought into security.
what makes you think "using the internet" equates to "having a server completely open to the public with no backup processes"? in the UK you can do your taxes online, I guess if they get DDOS'd no one will have to pay?
I'm more worried about another slammer-type attack that floods the Internet.
:)
Besides, encryption and such are fine, but just keeping everyone else off your network (the old method) makes the security model much simpler.
The more access there is, the more possible attacks there are. Which means that more attention has to be spent testing and checking these systems.
Which means more jobs! So it isn't all bad.
Well, they have DOS systems connected to a private network.
The weird thing is that they're looking at moving to the Internet to get away from the limitations of their DOS system.
Why don't they keep the current, private network and just upgrade the machines and the software on that? Why do the upgrade AND move to a less secure network?
Why is "Laura Hughes, vice president of national marketing" in charge instead of computer experts?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
The main job of the Fed is to adjust interest rates as the governing board deems necessary to keep the economy stable.
You mean that they adjust the interest rates to ensure that the US Gov't will never be able to pay back the debt that they owe to the Fed, thus keeping all of us normal citizens forever enslaved to pay back a loan that we never even asked for.
It's convenient for the people closest to the top of the pyramid...
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Would you prefer gold, some other metal dug out of the ground or rare sea shells?
A lot of people do... Putting money in gold and other precious metals has been the hallmark of "un-patriotic" money management for years.
Basically your choices are:
a) put faith in a completely made up system run by "the authorities".
b) put faith in continued scarcity of certain once-precious resources.
Neither is really all that appealing. Personally I put faith in my ability to make computers do stupid tricks. Other than that, I figure ride the tides of fortune that come your way.
Much has been made of the evil of monopolies on Slashdot (from Microsoft dominating the desktop to Apple regulating music formats).
The Federal Reserve is a private corporation operated and owned by private banks and given special monopoly existence by congress back on Christmas Eve in 1913. This is a very scary monopoly that has (perhaps unconstitutionally) usurped Congress's power to coin, issue, and regulate the American money supply.
While I won't attempt to proffer all of the observations (probably labeled as "tinfoil hat theories" because neither political party wants to call them into question) I will point out a very human readable web page that highlights some of these issues in a phone call to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
I realize that the Internet is a public network and that the Fed has every right to switch its internals over to using it. But it will likely cause two bits of controversy.
First, they are a private corporation so if the receive a private set of Class A IP addresses or other special treats it will expose some flaws in the public vs. private issues of control of the internet. (This is probably of more interest to slashdotters.)
Second, The Fed may be exposing tremendous auditability and accounting problems that don't exist on the private network. While their books and procedures are publicly audited, they have simply "lost" money (both physical and transactional). The paranoid would suspect that perhaps they've been inspired by the Diebold voting systems which can apparently cause votes to simply come and go in an unaccountable manner. The less paranoid should still see that this change will need a great deal more publicly auditable security to keep robber barrons from simply coming up with a new means of screwing over those of us who rely on cash & credit.
I can understand the need to migrate from old proprietary technolgies to new ones, but this migration should be watched VERY closely and where possible should be opened up for further audit and regulation.